Fitness Professional & Writer

Exploring SHNF

The Sam Houston National Forest is all around the town that I live in. I’ve only seen little bits of it, mostly in Huntsville State Park and parts of the Lone Star Trail, so I want to get more familiar with it while I have a chance.

So I took the bike out there yesterday. I wasn’t planning to go more than 20-30 miles…but I got too into the exploring and ended up going way further west than I meant to. I ended up riding right at 40 miles. I rode on all sorts of surface…dirt, gravel, sand (unfortunately), pavement, a little bit of doubletrack..it was a nice variety.

I took FM1374 out of town and turned off on Ball Rd. Took Ball until it dead ended on some property..but there was a gated dirt road between the properties. I hopped the fence and rode it several miles into the middle of nothing and finally hit the bottom half of FM1374. I rode that west until Stubblefield Lake Rd and took that into the rec area. Ate lunch by the lake and rode southwest on FS216, then west on FS208. Took FS208 to FM1791 to TX30 and back into town. I made it just in time for Sonic happy hour!

I found all sorts of trails on the way down, but most branched off FS208. I found a couple atv trails, a bunch of multi-use non-atv trails, and 3 singletrack bike trails. I’m looking forward to checking them out.

It was freakin’ hot! I think it only hit 94 but the heat index was 100-101. I was out there for over 4 hours. The heat really started to get to me as I was riding TX30 back into town. Buuuut I made it.

Side note – so I still haven’t taken a bikepacking trip yet. I decided against going on Sunday mainly because it’s summer. I don’t mind going out for the day but I have no real desire to camp in this kind of weather. That being said, I will probably take mostly day trips until September/October.